Earlier this week I made a guest appearance on the third episode of the “Early Days of Ethereum” series which Kieren James-Lubin, Victor Wong and James Hormuzdiar, the Co-Founders of BlockApps have been making in the past month or two.
We spoke for about 80 minutes and it was a delight to reminisce about these happy days. I absolutely loved the earlier videos and wrote a long blog post with links to posts, videos and other notes on topics which came to mind for me while I was watching them, and the guys where good enough to invite me on for the third episode. We ran out of time before even getting on to talking about the genesis of the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance (late 2016 and 2017), so it looks like I’ll be back for a fourth episode at some stage soon.
Here is the video, with notes to follow:
Here are the Ethereum Foundation People and Ethereum Foundation Timeline pages from my blog which I refer to in the video, which I put together in late 2017 while trying to work out “What on earth was happening at the Foundation when Ming was hired in 2015 which made that look like a good option?”
This video from DEVCON0 (held in Berlin in November 2014 is a particular gem. It has short clips of just about everybody who was involved in Ethereum in that first year introducing themselves. From my “People” page I have shortcuts to the right timestamps for them all, but the whole video is pretty short and well worth a watch. Gav provides some contemporary big picture context at the start, ahead of the introductions.
Below are some links and screenshots of articles and web pages related to The DAO, which also has its own Wikipedia page, and to some of the points we talked about in the video. I would recommend Laura Shin’s book at the canonical best information on this whole saga. There is also a detailed timeline on the ETC community website.
January 7th 2016 – DEVCON1: Slock.it – Christoph Jentzsch (but the conference was actually November 2015), with Stephan Tual with the assist for the remote-power-enable teapot. I believe that this stage, the DAO plan was still constrained to Slock.it’s own business plan, not “The DAO” generalization which came later.
March 20th 2016 – How to Sue a DAO, by Stephen Palley:
April 26th 2016 – Vitalik Buterin, Gavin Wood, Alex van De Sande, Vlad Zamfir announced amongst exceptional DAO Curators article by Stephan Tual, together with a Snapshot of the Curator page from DAOHub.org.
May 27th 2016 – Vitalik Buterin, twitter:
June 17th 2016, Stephan Tual, twitter:
June 24th 2016 – DAO Wars: Your voice on the soft-fork dilemma, Péter Szilágyi, Ethereum Foundation blog, announcing the Geth release with a soft-fork to censor transactions related to The DAO.
June 26th 2016 – How we find common ground and settle our differences, Gavin Wood, Parity blog
June 28th 2016 – Security Alert – DoS Vulnerability in the Soft Fork, by Felix Lange, Ethereum Foundation blog, announcing that the soft-fork had a vulnerability and was aborted.
July 15th 2016 – To fork or not to fork, by Jeff Wilcke, Ethereum Foundation, announcing the Geth release containing the hard-fork, enabled by default (as was also the case for Parity), controversially following the result of a very short-notice, low-participation coin vote to determine that default. Mist used a modal dialog to force end-users to explicitly choose. Some in the ETC community think this default tipped the scales and was a betrayal of neutrality by the EF, but I honestly don’t think it made any real difference. You would have had to be a complete moron to be unaware of the controversy around the hard fork and run the new code by accident.
The ugly code from Geth implementing the DAO hard fork.
August 1st 2016 – The accidental beginning of the “100% ETH” purity pledge meme which drove the communities even further apart, as it became socially unacceptable to be associated with Ethereum Classic.
July 27th 2017 – SEC Issues Investigative Report Concluding DAO Tokens, a Digital Asset, Were Securities, press release (and the actual report PDF)
October 30th 2018 – Ethereum Special Projects announces 15,000 ETC donation to Ethereum Classic Cooperative, by Virgil Griffith. We miss you, Virgil. He is currently serving a five year prison sentence for sanctions violation for a trip he took to North Korea for a blockchain conference. Virgil was a big bridge builder between Ethereum and Ethereum Classic, and is indirectly the reason for me being in my current role at the ETC Cooperative. He invited my predecessor, Anthony Lusardi, to speak at EDCON in May 2018 (where I met him), and Anthony invited Virgil and myself to ETC Summit in September 2018. I started my role in January 2019.
September 25th 2019, a long twitter thread from me explaining the birth of ETC and what ETC is about in response to a question. Click on this, and scroll down from the top:
Incidentally this long twitter thread was actually with Roman Storm, one of the co-Founders of Tornado Cash who is under arrest and facing serious charges from the US government. Please do consider supporting his legal fees if you feel strongly, as I do, that the OFAC sanctions against a smart contract and these later indictments are a huge overstep, and that financial privacy is a fundamental human right.
February 22nd 2022 – The Cryptopians: Idealism, Greed, Lies, and the Making of the First Big Cryptocurrency Craze, Laura Shin’s seminal book on the early days of Ethereum.
22nd February 2022 – Exclusive: Austrian Programmer And Ex Crypto CEO Likely Stole $11 Billion Of Ether, by Laura Shin, Forbes, to accompany the release of the book.
I look forward to episode four!
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